


Ungrateful

by LananiA3O



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Batfam Content War, Gen, Halloween, Halloween Content War, Hurt/Comfort, pumpkin carving accidents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 17:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16454252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LananiA3O/pseuds/LananiA3O
Summary: Dick is planning to bring the entire family together to celebrate not only Halloween, but also Damian's resurrection. However, when a seemingly random line from Damian during the pumpkin carving makes Jason bolt from the manor, Tim decides to dig a little deeper and what he finds is not good...





	Ungrateful

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Halloween Content War 2018. Also to fill [this lovely prompt](http://lananiscorner.tumblr.com/post/179565627613/could-you-write-a-little-drabble-about-jason-tim).
> 
> One could say this is the most cheerful of my HCW2018 stories...

„And I still say it is ridiculous how much of a fuss everyone is making about this.”

Tim could feel, more than see, the shift in Jason at the sound of Damian’s words.  Later, after everyone had gotten their stitches and their painkillers and their antibiotics, he would pinpoint this precise moment as the point where it all went to hell. But in the moment itself, all Tim could do was watch in horror, just a fraction of a second too late to actually help the situation, as Jason grabbed his pumpkin by the eye sockets and swung it full-force at Damian’s face. There was a crunch – probably a broken nose or at least a tooth knocked loose – followed by a yelp – definitely Damian – and then the sound of angry screaming from both of them, while Tim leaped to get in between them and separate them somehow. He should have known it was a fool’s errant—both Jason and Damian outclassed him in unarmed, hand-to-hand combat, but instinct and reflex hardly ever waited for reason to introduce itself to a crisis at hand.

By the time the blade slashed through his shirt and spilled red onto the fluffy carpet beneath his feet, Tim was fairly certain he had heard half the English swear word corpus and at least a hundred distinct words of finest Arabic cursing under the sun. The pain barely registered; adrenaline could do that to a person. It was Damian, once again, who cut through the turmoil like a hot knife through butter and Tim felt a hysterical laugh bubble up inside his throat. Damian. Resolving a crisis. Without violence.

He was either dreaming or hallucinating or in really big trouble.

“Drake is bleeding.”

What registered first was the tone of Damian’s voice, so flat and factual, like he was telling someone that tea was ready or something. It took Tim’s brain a few seconds to accurately process the actual information behind the sentence. Then the pain hit.

His ribs were on fire, metaphorically speaking. He still had enough awareness of his surroundings to know that they hadn’t even finished carving the pumpkins yet, much less putting candles inside of them. Tim braced himself with his left arm and reached down with his right hand. It came back perfect crimson.

“Oh hell no.”

 _Great, now I’m doing it too._ Tim wanted to roll his eyes at whatever part of his brain had decided to mimic Damian’s apparent disinterest. This was a knife wound. In his ribs. _Shouldn’t I be worried or something?_

“Let me see.”

Suddenly, Jason was there with a first aid kit. When he had gotten that from the nearest storage room was anybody’s guess, but Tim wasn’t going to complain. Not when Jason was the only one between the three of them who sounded adequately worried. Tim hissed through his teeth as he inspected and cleansed the wound.

“You’re lucky—it’s shallow enough that I can fix that right here with stitches instead of having to take you to the ER.”

“Yes, lucky me, I was born in a field of four-leafed clovers and horseshoes.” Tim rolled his eyes. Luck had never really been on his side. Getting knifed by his little demonic brother the day before Halloween was just the cherry on top of the misfortune cake.

“If you had minded your own business,” Damian growled at him as he got up and took the knife to the bathroom, presumably to get rid of the evidence, “you would not need stitches now.”

“I could have, if you two hadn’t decided to be assholes to one another.” The sting of disinfectant was a familiar agony. Tim still wanted to flinch. He wanted to snap at Jason too, but the thought died the moment he turned his head to look at him.

Jason looked... remorseful? Somehow that didn’t compute. It hadn’t been Jason with the knife. And it wasn’t like he was being a jerk about his. His reaction was appropriate, his first aid was up to Alfred’s high standards, and the stitches were some of the neatest Tim had ever gotten. Tim wanted to say _something_ , but the stony silence emanating from Jason made his tongue freeze up. It wasn’t quite the same as Bruce’s stern scowling, but it was equally effective.

By the time Jason was done stitching, Damian had returned with a two hand towels and what looked suspiciously like diluted dishwasher soap. He went to work quickly, dabbing at the stains left on the carpet until they faded from deep red to faint pink to just slightly off white.

“So...” Tim pushed his shirt back over the bandage Jason had put on him to cover up the stitches and slipped into his hoodie for good measure. He could get a new shirt later. “Are we actually going to tell Bruce or Alfred or anybody about this?”

“Yes.”—“No.”

Damian glared up at Jason—god, it was weird how tall Jason was compared to any of them, and especially Damian—with his brows furrowed and his lip split. In hindsight, he was probably lucky that pumpkin hadn’t broken his nose.

“We are _not_ going to tell anyone about this. Grayson would never let us hear the end of it. This enforced family reunion celebration is exhausting enough already. I do not need Grayson’s constant hovering like he is a mother hen looking after her chickens to come along with it.”

“He’ll probably do that anyway,” Tim said with a grin. “After all, the reason he wanted to have everyone together here to celebrate even though Bruce wants to focus on the job is because this is our first big holiday together since... well... you know—“

 _Since you came back from the dead_ , Tim wanted to say, but he didn’t get the chance. Just like before, the shift was instantaneous. Every muscle in Jason’s body seemed to tense in icy chills. He seemed to grapple with himself for something to say. Something scathing. Something they would all surely come to regret later. The fingers of his right hand clenched into a tight fist and Tim was ready to vault upwards and get between him and Damian again if need be, when Jason swallowed hard.

“I’m leaving. Happy Halloween.”

And leave he did. Tim watched, frozen speechless for a moment while Damian shouted angrily, as Jason turned and walked out of the room. Not ran. Not dashed. Walked. For some reason, that felt even worse.

Tim’s legs finally decided to obey his brain again when the door snapped shut. He scrambled to his feet, cursing at the pinching of the stitches in his side and hurried out into the corridor. He caught a glimpse of Jason’s jacket as it disappeared down the hall, no doubt headed for the backdoor to the garage. Tim took a shortcut across the upper floor and slipped out the window and down the vines stretching along the western façade just in time to hear the revving of the motorcycle engine.

“Jason, wait!” He dropped off the garage roof and in front of the door, only to be greeted by the screech of brakes and tires. And a face that could murder kittens.

“What the fuck are you doing, Tim? Are you trying to get run over?”

“I’m trying to figure out what happened back there,” Tim argued. “Look, Bruce and Alfred aren’t here right now and I’m not going to tell them anything. What’s going on?”

For a second, it seemed that Jason was actually entertaining the idea of giving him an honest answer. Then he swerved past Tim and took off down the drive.

Tim cursed his rotten luck.

***

“Are you still upset because of Todd’s ill-timed outburst?”

Tim’s fingers froze over the keyboard as he counted slowly to ten and swallowed the urge to lash out at the little demon brat. He wanted to criticize the choice of words, but unfortunately, ‘outburst’ was exactly the right word for what had happened the day before and its timing really couldn’t have been worse. Dick had been so happy and proud that he had managed to convince all of them to get together for civilian Halloween, not ‘Scarecrow is threatening to poison the entire city and Joker is sewing spooky masks onto people’s faces’ Halloween. Just pumpkin pie and jack-o’-lanterns and some hot pumpkin spice latte and maybe a scary movie. Everything had been going so well...

Until ‘And I still say it is ridiculous how much of a fuss everyone is making about this.’

“Damian, what exactly did Jason shout at you while the two of you were trying to murder each other?”

Damian’s face twisted into a sneer. “Please don’t be ridiculous, Drake. If we had tried to murder each other, one of us would be dead by now.”

Tim sighed. Supposedly, he should be happy that Damian no longer had the over-inflated ego to believe that he would definitely, one hundred percent, without a shadow of a doubt, come out of that encounter victorious, but an evasion was still an evasion and Tim was on his fifth energy drink. He was literally too tired for this shit.

“Damian, please, it’s important.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Yes, you do!”

He hadn’t meant to make it sound like an accusation. Tim snapped his mouth shut at the realization of just how high and loud his voice had gotten. Not just because of Damian, but also because they were currently in the Batcave, at the Batcomputer, and while Bruce was presumably still asleep and Alfred was busy preparing ‘breakfast’, one could never be careful enough. They had told Bruce and Dick about the fight. They hadn’t told them about the cut. Tim didn’t plan to either.

“I know adrenaline can screw over memory formation, but I also know your mother trained you better than that,” Tim tried once more, this time in the gentlest tone he could muster. “Please, Damian. Work with me here for once, okay?”

“Tt!”

Damian scoffed, grabbed a nearby chair, and hunched down like a literal angry bird. When he still didn’t talk four minutes later, Tim redirected his attention at the screen.

The first case file was old, but it would forever be fresh in Tim’s memory. There was reading about one of your two childhood idols having died overseas and then there was seeing the gruesome autopsy report and mission file on the Batcomputer. Tim wasn’t entirely sure what he was hoping to gain from re-hashing the Ethiopia file for the estimated six-hundredth time, but he was sure this is where the connection was.

The second file was much younger, but no less painful. Alright, he and Damian had never gotten along well, but Tim had never wished him dead and watching Bruce and Dick nearly destroying themselves over his death had been excruciating. Part of him was aware that he probably shouldn’t be having that file open with Damian sitting right next to him, but that was his own fault, really. If he didn’t want to cooperate, he could always just leave.

“He called me a spoiled, ungrateful little brat.” Tim stopped scrolling and glanced to the side. Damian was glaring off into the distance, but Tim wasn’t fooled. He knew where his attention was. “He said ‘at least for you they tried’.”

Tim flinched. It was obvious who ‘they’ were. Bruce. Dick. Barbara. Tim. Everyone had been trying to find a way to bring Damian back, at least for a while. Bruce had worked himself ragged. And even though he might never admit it out loud, Tim was sure Jason would feel forever guilty about Damian’s death.

“He said ‘you’ve got no idea the things he did just to get your ungrateful ass back’.”

 _The things he did_... that... sounded troubling. Tim felt his skin crawl as the words echoed in his brain. Somehow, it felt even more personal now, like Bruce had wronged Jason not just in the past—which arguably was not wronging at all since none of them had known of a reliable way to bring someone back from the dead without turning him into a crazed zombie—but in the present as well.

“I’m looking at this from the wrong angle.” Tim closed the files, took another sip from his energy drink, and opened a new search instead. This time, he was tracking Bruce’s mission logs in between Damian’s death and his resurrection. It was only a hunch, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible had happened there.

“Stop!” When exactly Damian had decided to join the search was anyone’s guess, but Tim stopped scrolling regardless. “Third one from the top. Birkuta. With Amba Mariam in the notes.”

“What’s Amba Mariam?”

Damian’s voice was strung tight as a bow. “Magdala Valley.”

 _Oh crap. Oh crap oh crap oh crap_. Tim took a deep breath, opened the file, and regretted it within less than ten seconds.

He wanted to throw up every single one of his five energy drinks.

***

It was cold. It was rainy. Someone one floor down and two windows to the right was having a serious shouting match with their spouse. He had a headache. He had gotten shot earlier that night because he had been stupid and careless—what more would one expect from the Robin who died? He was hungry. He was tired. His intel was sketchy. His contact had been fished out of Gotham Bay with a block of cement around his feet. The shipment was late. If it was what he thought it was, two pounds were potentially enough to fuck over Gotham’s entire water supply.

And yet this was still a better Halloween than what would have awaited him at the manor. Jason drew the camouflage rain cover tighter around himself and lit a cigarette.

Dick was probably furious and disappointed right now. Bruce... probably only disappointed, but Jason wasn’t even sure about that. Did Bruce actually still care enough about him to be disappointed?

Part of him hoped he didn’t. Part of him hoped that Bruce would just put an end to it all, tell Jason that he hated him and that he never wanted to see him again, so that Jason could finally file him away in the ever-growing Jason Todd folder of ‘people who can swallow a fucking grenade for all I care’ and stop feeling miserable every time he went to the manor. Mostly because he wouldn’t be going to the manor anymore.

The pumpkin carving had been fun, actually. Ok, the little demon spawn was never the most pleasant person to be around, but Tim’s mitigating influence had made it manageable. For a while at least. Until that fucking—

 _Don’t think about it, Jason_ , Red Hood thought to himself. _It’s done. It’s over. Forget about it. Move on_.

That was always harder than it sounded in his head. Forgetting. Moving on. He had been getting there, but then Bruce had to come and ruin it all, of course, like a goat trampling through a freshly-grown garden, ripping out all the flowers to expose the rotten weeds underneath. Jason had all but begged him to not go there. He had spelled out his gripes loud and clear. He had looked at the goat and said ‘please leave the petunias alone’ and the goat had gone right ahead and eaten the damn petunias until the fucking mint underneath was once more sparkly green.

_Fuck him. Fuck him with a rusty fork._

At last, there was movement by the docks. Jason focused his lenses, zoomed in, and adjusted his audio receivers. Three guys. Lots of talking. No solid evidence. The conversation lasted almost eight minutes. Then, all three thugs went there merry ways again. Jason cursed under his breath. Another bust. The sixth in as many hours. Also, he was starting to feel like his bones had gone numb.

Maybe they had, maybe they hadn’t. With the effects of the Pit, one could never tell.

There was a soft patter behind him, duller and less regular than the hammering, almost freezing rain. Jason jumped to his feet instantly, pistols drawn and trigger finger ready, only to come face to face with the most pitiful case of hair-plastered-to-face he had ever seen. Or in this case, hair-plastered-to-cowl.

“I think you’re in the wrong neighborhood, Red Robin.” He lowered his guns slowly, but didn’t sit down yet. It was never a good idea to get too comfy when one of the birds was around. “Don’t you have a party to go to?”

“I’m pretty sure the big party is cancelled,” Tim replied with a shrug, then lifted the strangely inconspicuous, yet water-proof bag he was holding in his right hand. “But I figured that you were probably going to throw yourself into the most miserable work you could instead, so I brought some treats to make it slightly less miserable.” He nodded towards the spot where Jason had set up his little camp. “Mind if I join you? Four eyes see more than two.”

“And two mouths talk way too much.”

“I promise I’ll be silent as a mouse.”

“Mice can actually squeal pretty loudly, you know.”

Finally, Tim seemed to get the message. The sigh that came out of his mouth could at best be described as beleaguered.

“Fine! Have it your way. I’ll just eat that exquisite pumpkin pie Alfred baked all by myself while posting ugly-sobbing ‘my family hates me’ tweets on my Twitter.”

“Alfred’s pumpkin pie?” _Fuck._ He hated his tongue for letting that slip. He hated his stomach even more for rumbling in outrage.

“The very same. Roasted some of the seeds for snacks, too.”

_Fuck._

“Fine.” Jason turned around again and tried to get comfortable once more. Well... not that he had really been comfortable before. He was actually sore all over, but that was just how stakeouts went. “Have a seat. But if you give away my location or spook my targets I’ll give you a proper cut.”

If Tim was in any way, shape, or form intimidated, he didn’t show it. Instead, he settled down to Jason’s left, draped his cape around his torso for quick shelter, and handed over one of the pies from the bag. Jason ripped the lid off and wanted to cry.

It smelled _soooooo good_. No food had any right to smell that good, but somehow Alfred always managed to make it even better. It smelled like falling leaves during sunset and fire in a hearth and candle light through a pumpkin. It smelled like warmth and bliss and a sense of longing and belonging that seemed alien to him pretty much his entire life.

And the taste...

“I would kill for those pies,” Jason muttered through a mouthful of filling. “I really would.”

“I’ve only had this pie for a minute and a half, but if anything happened to it, I would kill everyone on this dock and then myself,” Tim added over a bite of his own and Jason chuckled.

“God I _wish_ I was home with Netflix right now.”

The noise that came out of Tim’s over-stuffed mouth was somewhere between surprise, attention-grab, and food bliss. Jason raised an eyebrow as he rummaged through the bag and brought out a water-proof tablet.

“I’ve got you covered.”

“You are ridiculous.” Jason said it and he meant it, but he wasn’t going to complain. Not when the docks were dead silent and the rain was too harsh and cold and the food was so good.

They were halfway through the second episode of The Good Place when another bird dropped right next to them. Damian didn’t even ask for permission to sit down. Instead, he reached straight into the bag, took out another pie and fork, and plopped down next to Jason.

“It is done.”

“What is? And shouldn’t you be at a party? Dickie-boy is gonna be disappointed.”

“Oh, he has passed disappointed a long time ago,” Damian assured him. “When I left he was yelling at father over the file.”

“What file?”

“Not important,” Tim cut in quickly. “We’ll fill you in later. Damian, you’ll like this show. It’s about a bunch of people who are stuck in a seemingly idyllic paradise together but actually really can’t stand each other’s guts.”

“Tt.” Damian stabbed the fork into his pie and rolled his eyes. “And I always thought movies were supposed to be escapism.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story now has a sequel: [Irreconcilable](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17570738)


End file.
